Text size suddenly got bigger on all sites on Google Chrome

This morning I started my Google Chrome browser as I do every day. The text size was suddenly bigger than normal, on all sites. I did not change any setting anywhere.

If I set the zoom to 90% it looks fine, but this breaks various things (e.g. Stack Exchange chat) so prefer to avoid it if possible.

Setting font size to Small in Chrome Settings also help, but it's too small.

I have uninstalled Chrome (deleting local data) and installed again, same thing. Tried beta channel as well, no change.

Windows 7 OS 64 bit, Display set to 125% from the very beginning. (Did not change this for years)

What could have caused this and how can it be solved?

This very question turns out to be a good example to demonstrate what I mean:

While the body itself is small (as I changed the font size in Settings), other things are still huge and not affected by the setting.

This reddit thread seems to suggest that this is a Chrome bug. For now, a temporary workaround is to force HiDPI support in Chrome

To do this:

1. Right click on the Chrome link
2. Choose Properties and then add /high-dpi-support=1 /force-device-scale-factor=1 to the existing Link to your path to chrome.exe.
3. Be sure to close all running chrome processes from the taskbar before re-running the shortcut with the flags

You can also fix this issue by turning off the "Disable DirectWrite" advanced setting in Chrome.

i.e. Disable the setting that is called "Disable DirectWrite". Do not Enable this setting.

Paste this into the Chrome address bar and turn off the setting:

• chrome://flags/#disable-direct-write

When you are done, it should look like this:

Thanks to Ludwig on this bug report:

• https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/chrome/YuDpb4k44cI/gjQUZC1y8GUJ